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Is the pope’s new encyclical on the environment an instant classic or his most successful failure?

God said to the high and low IQs alike, "You shall love me with all your mind." Nobody, or rather, no mind is exempt. In theory our first thoughts, like our first fruits, belong to God. In practice, however, holy thinking and holy learning are often wholly absent amongst our everyday priorities and practices.

God made reality with prayer in mind. It's an essential part of the infrastructure of everyday life. In fact, prayer is as much (and more) a language of reality as mathematics, chemistry or physics. The supernatural and the natural are not separate in Christ - for all reality is His reality. As such, God invites us to pray about everything, not as if it were so, but because it is so.

A life lived like Jesus can be truly unremarkable. The vast majority of it might be incredibly normal, seemingly uneventful, and at times quite boring.

It is considered a mark of maturity to endure the company of the unwanted, to abide the annoying, and bear the unbearable. And so it is, but this is not yet Christian maturity. A Christian is not merely to suffer another, but for another. This is love.

Crisis and calamity call us back to God, or at least, cause us to call out to Him. Anxious billions have asked, "where are you God?" - and He often seems far away. He is the Almighty Absentee.

Specifically, in the story of The Rich Young Man we'll look at why Jesus often fails our expectations. In the healing of the demon possessed man we'll see how The Lord often defies human expectations - and the differences between these two passages can teach us about how God transcends our needs.

By 1896 the 19th century was decidedly Great Britain’s. At 1945 we rounded-up and called it the American Century. 12 years into the 21st and already there’s a contender: Christianity.

Christianity is distinguishable as a personal religion. It’s defined by a personal relationship with a relatable God. And yet, sometimes, things seem all the more impersonal because of it: when it seems only the ceiling hears your prayers; believing in God but not being able to fully explain him; when the dark nights of the soul take up the daytime; when sicknesses strip the happiness and beauty from life, like a wind that scatters the top soil from a field.

From Athens near the Aegean to Washington on the Potomac, a curtain is descending on the days of prolonged deficit financing. Still, there are those who believe the show must go on.